What browsers have our visitors been using this year?
The topic of which Web browsers are the most popular came up at our weekly Web team meeting this morning. So I went away and did a little digging in our Google Analytics account. (Bear in mind that I have no degree of expertise in statistics.)
The issue was raised because we’re currently debugging an issue in Google Chrome, and someone wondered out-loud whether it was really worth trying to fix in such a minor browser if it worked fine in IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera. The statistics showed that Google Chrome really isn’t that minor a browser now with a share of 11.98% of all visits.
Google Analytics
Looking at the last 12 months (from 01 January – yesterday) I was surprised to see that in September Safari overtook Firefox as the second most used browser after Internet Explorer.
It makes sense that Internet Explorer and Safari, which are the default browsers in Windows and MacOS X respectively, should be first and second, but I don’t really understand immediately why Safari should overtake Firefox in September, even taking into account the new student intake which I would have assumed were also included in the January–June figures?
The Safari figures also include handheld Apple devices, such as iPhone, iPod and iPad, but overall those platforms together only make up 0.8% of the total annual figure.
As a general indication of trend, comparing the January figures to those for December so far, it’s interesting to note that both usage figures for IE and Firefox dropped while Safari, Chrome and Opera grew, with Chrome growing the most.
| Chrome | UP | 5.58% |
| Safari | UP | 3.66% |
| Opera | UP | 0.13% |
| Firefox | DOWN | 4.76% |
| Internet Explorer | DOWN | 4.83% |
Other browsers
This graph and table, of course, only mention “The Big Five”. There are other browsers out there.
The statistics for 2010 to date show that 185 different browsers have been used to access the University website. Most of the other browsers (not those listed above) are for mobile devices, .e.g.
- BlackBerry
- HTC HD2
- HTC Touch
- HTC TyTN
- LG
- Samsung
- Opera Mini
- Palm
- Playstation 3
- Playstation Portable
- Xda Ignito
Interesting to see games consoles (Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable) appearing on the list. Over the past 12 months the University website has been visited 451 times using a Playstation 3. Not quite enough to warrant commissioning a St Andrews level on Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.
Broken down by OS
Breaking the browsers down by operating system, across the entire year (01 January–12 December) here are the top 10 browsers by operating system
| 1 | Internet Explorer | Windows | 43.6% |
| 2 | Firefox | Windows | 18.9% |
| 3 | Safari | Mac | 18.85% |
| 4 | Chrome | Windows | 8.7% |
| 5 | Firefox | Mac | 4.88% |
| 6 | Safari | Windows | 0.93% |
| 7 | Chrome | Mac | 0.91% |
| 8 | Firefox | Linux | 0.65% |
| 9 | Opera | Windows | 0.61% |
| 10 | Safari | iPhone | 0.55% |
It will be interesting to see how that moves over the next 12 months and whether things have changed dramatically this time next year.